With release from rehab, more uncertainty looms for Lohan

LOS ANGELES — Lindsay Lohan is scheduled to be released from the Betty Ford rehab center in Palm Springs sometime Monday, only to face an uncertain career and looming legal issues.

For months, the 24-year-old actress has been haunted by her inability, or unwillingness, to shake a 3 1/2 year-old drunken driving case that resulted in two rehab stints and two trips to jail in 2010 alone.

And now she also remains under investigation for alleged misdemeanor battery on a Betty Ford worker and needs to satisfy a criminal judge that she's been in compliance with her probation terms during her three-month stint at the Ford center.

Still, experts say Lohan has a good shot at recovery. Provided, of course, that she wants it, changes her party girl lifestyle and remains in continued therapy.

If a New Year's Day message posted on her Twitter account is any indication, the “Mean Girls” star seems ready to do just that. “Today is the first day of the rest of my life,” it said. “'The future depends on what we do in the present.' -Mahatma Gandhi... One step at a time...”

Her father, Michael Lohan, is expressing confidence as she begins her next chapter.

“She has taken the right steps and put the right people back in her life that she had at the best part of her life, to really use it as a springboard,” Lohan said during an interview Monday on CBS' “The Early Show.”

But he also sounded a familiar alarm, identifying “one imperative key element that is missing.” He said that if his ex-wife Dina Lohan “can't resolve the differences she believes that we have, it's going to be a never-ending battle for Lindsay.”